I always watch synthesia videos on youtube and actually use them to learn how to play piano pieces I like. I recently bought a digital piano that says it can use MIDI. The thing is, I don’t have any idea how it works and where to start.
In: Technology
Maybe you remember growing up and playing with a digital keyboard at the department store. You could select a couple different “instruments” and when you pressed the piano keys on the keyboard, a synthesized “trumpet” sound would come out. Well professional musicians needed a way to separate the keyboard part from the synthesizer part so that they could get the exact sounds *they* wanted.
So MIDI was invented which was just a standard way to send digital signals from a keyboard to the synthesizer module. This allowed keyboard players to get exactly the keyboard they wanted with the right feel to the keys etc and then connect it to a synthesizer module that had the different sounds they wanted. They need the flexibility of being able to mix and match keyboards with synth modules.
When computers started being powerful enough to do sound, MIDI was extended into a file format that computers could understand. The files were basically just a list of the MIDI commands. You could play the keyboard and have your computer record all the MIDI commands it received and exactly when it received them. Then the file could be used to play back that performance as if someone was doing it again on the keyboard. You could play around with what instrument synth patches you used and you can even manually build a MIDI file on your computer without the keyboard part.
This is why so many people call it digital sheet music. It ended up doing that but that wasn’t the original intention.
Now MIDI is used for all sorts of timing based triggering. I use it at home to allow me to use a physical hardware controller to adjust audio levels in a virtual mixer on my computer. So I move a fader up and down on my controller and it moves the fader inside the software mixer on my computer. MIDI is the language that is used to communicate those fader moves from the controller to my software.
MIDI is also used for lots of automation in live performances. When you’re at a concert and you see the band is playing along in time to a video on the screen. One of the many ways to sync that together is using MIDI.
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